Card counting in Blackjack sometimes is considered to be a Blackjack strategy of the past, although this may be true, there are still useful times when card counting can come in handy, especially if you're playing in a single deck Blackjack. Counting cards with multiple decks is much harder but it can still work to your advantage.
The only time Blackjack card counting system has no advantage to the player is when the dealer uses a shuffle machine, or when playing Blackjack online, as it acts like a shuffle machine using a new deck each hand.
Blackjack card counting will allow you to know roughly what cards are left in the deck and the probability of getting a right card. Instead of counting every card in the deck, as most of the complicated card counting methods use, we will focus on the face cards and ten, as well as the number of players at the table.
While playing Blackjack at a table with three busy boxes, you would predict that at least four ten valued cards would be played. If there are only three played, the running count would be +1 (four cards expected - three cards played = plus one). This means that the next round there is expected to be one extra 10 to turn up. If however there are five tens played the count would be -1 (four cards expected - five cards played equals -1). This tells you the probability of turning a 10.
It's important to understand the difference between a running count and the true count. Let me explain it on the exampole, if our running count is +6 and there are three decks used we need to divide the running count by the number of decks used to get the true count (6 : 3 = 2).
This will tell you that in the remaining 52 card decks, there are eighteen 10s and 34 non-tens. If many 10s are already played there may be a better chance of a card of a low value to be drawn and you can increase your bet.
